Virtue (25 page)

I throw myself onto my stomach, grab a tumbler and a brownie, light a cigarette.

‘God, I’m sorry,’ Harriet says for the umpteenth time, already leaving La Hayman behind her to return to the Moresbys.

‘Shut up, Harriet. At least your brother keeps an excellent cellar.’

‘Well, yes, but most of it’s left over from Daddy. God, this really wasn’t what I meant when I said coming down here would make you feel better.’

I take a bite of cake, roll onto my back and say, ‘But the funny thing is, I do.’

She sits up, splutters, ‘What the hell are you talking about? Have you gone stark staring mad?’

‘No, come on, Harriet. One night with that lot and you can’t help but feel better.’

‘Well, yes, on the banging your head against a brick wall principle,’ she concedes.

‘Yeah, and …’

‘Oh, excuse me,’ she says. ‘Are you implying that you feel superior to my noble and elevated family?’

I don’t bother to answer, just smile at her.

Harriet chews a mouthful of brownie, washes it down with a slug of thirty-year-old port.

‘Well, I suppose,’ she says, ‘at least they’re not Frankensteins like your lot.’

This is still a bit tender. ‘Yes, but the point is that my lot aren’t my lot, are they? My lot are a tart and some pissed-up brickie whose name she never knew. Your lot actually
are
your lot.’

‘I’m a Pigg, remember,’ she states.

‘Yer. On both sides by the looks of things.’

‘I really do hate Sofe,’ says Harriet. ‘She’s the most insufferable prig, isn’t she?’

‘Piggs, prigs, they’re all the same to me,’ I say, and because Shahin’s present is already beginning to top up the levels we’d attained before dinner, we both snigger roundly.

Then we fall silent for a bit as we mull over the evening’s events. My brain is already a tad fuzzy, as though someone’s lined the synapses with cotton wadding. Oh, dear, don’t think about cotton wadding. Thinking of anything absorbent always makes me feel queasy when I’m stoned. Cotton wool. Oh, bugger. I sit up, pinch my arm. Harriet, reclining again, has a hand flung above her head and stares at the ceiling like Pre-Raphaelite consumptive.

‘Of course,’ she says eventually, ‘I can’t expect them to understand me.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘Well, I’m an artist,’ she says grandly.

‘Piss artist more like,’ I reply. She ignores me.

‘You see, none of them has anything they actually want to
be
. It never occurs to them that you could actually be anything else than what they are already. So it confuses them. They think something’s gone wrong with me.’

‘Well, they’re not far wrong there,’ I reply, because sometimes insulting your friends is the best way of sympathising.

She sinks back into thought for a bit, those wool-covered cogs going clunk-clunk-clunk, then says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with having an ambition, though, is there?’

‘’Course not.’

‘So why,’ she asks, ‘don’t you have one?’

Oh, blimey. I hadn’t really thought about it. It’s only recently that I’ve learned to live for the day. I think, hard, then reply, ‘Do you know what?’

‘What?’

‘I think I’m living it right now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think maybe I had ambition rammed down my throat so relentlessly when I was a kid that it’s been burned right out of me. Does that sound stupid?’ She shakes her head. ‘Uh-uh.’

‘But you know, I’m happy right now. Well, obviously not right now, but generally I am.’

‘But, like, for ever?’ she asks. ‘I mean, I know it’s fun knocking around and picking up men and staying up all night and stuff, but …’

‘No, obviously not for ever. But you know, I think I’m doing pretty well considering. ’Cause, you know, in a lot of ways I feel like I’m about fifteen right now. I’m miles behind everyone else and I need to catch up.’

‘You?’ She turns her head to look at me. ‘You’re as old as the hills.’

‘Well, yeah, in some ways. But everyone else I know had an adolescence, and all I had was an education. There’s all this stuff I want to do, and it’s all the stuff I’m doing right now. I never
got
the bit where you run around and learn to drink and snog boys and sneak out to all-night parties. It was all I ever wanted to do when I was a teenager, and I never got the chance.’

Harriet nods. ‘Fair enough. And when you’ve finished?’

Do you know, I’ve never really thought about this. Like I say, learning to live for the day was a big achievement. So I think now. I think about the picture of adulthood they sold me when I was a child: a life of relentless toil, of competition, of trusting no one for fear of the knife in the back and the stolen idea, and I realise that ambition scares the bejasus out of me, that this aimless life is a natural reaction to the threat of success. And I think: yes, but maybe this aimless life is actually the life I want, maybe it’s what I’m good at. Maybe the training never took because I am, quite simply, not an ambitious person. And then I think: maybe that’s why so many people are unhappy at the moment despite our material well-being, why there’s this dreadful malaise afflicting the Western world: that there are millions of people walking around with this huge burden of guilt because in their heart of hearts they don’t really want to
be
anything. And we’re not allowed to have no goals these days; to have nothing one’s aiming for is a bigger sin than cheating a business partner. We’re no longer allowed to be contented with the old virtues – live well, do no harm, love your children. It’s not so long since ‘to live well’ meant to be kind, to have an eye to the welfare of others, to observe your religion; now it means to equip yourself with all the luxuries. To have no ambition in the modern world is tantamount to admitting you don’t deserve to exist. And maybe that’s what my vocation is: to lead the vanguard of those who say ‘Stop. Enough. Be content’. And having thought all this, I reply, ‘Dunno. Maybe I’ll think about it.’

Harriet starts snoring.

As you all know, I’m a single mum, and that’s why I speak out for single mums everywhere. God knows, it’s hard, working your fingers to the bone to provide for your little one, let alone have a social life, and sometimes you feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall, but there is one thing that makes it all worthwhile. It’s that moment when you pop in to kiss him goodnight and a little voice says sleepily, ‘I love you, Mummy’. When you hear that, all the sacrifices, all the struggle, all the tears mean nothing. There is nothing in this world more precious than the love between mother and child.

And there are few things more offensive than an ungrateful child. And some children really take the McVitie’s HobNob, as my mum used to say. Sorry to go back to this unpleasant subject only a fortnight since the last time, but what can you do? Some people just don’t know when they were born lucky.

As you know, the Godiva Fawcett Trust is organising a memorial march through London in three weeks’ time to mark the great lady’s birthday and demand that something is done about giving her a position she so richly deserves. The Vatican, by the way, is digging its feet in and claiming that only Catholics can be saints.

Typical, I say: what does a bunch of dried-up old farts who’ve never even been with a woman know about the real world?

Never mind: we can change their minds if they know that there are enough of us out there who care. If you want to show you care before the event, buy one of the pink-and-gold striped ribbons available at tills in major supermarkets now, and wear it with pride. I’ve been doing my bit, drumming up celebrity support, and the
Sparkle
is fronting the money for the pathologist’s investigation into why Godiva’s body remains untouched by the ravages of time. I care. Do you?

You would have thought everyone did, wouldn’t you? Well, it seems not everyone does. Who? None other than our old friend the Ungrateful Daughter, of course. La Moresby, it seems, is too busy flitting about her top people’s parties and ‘working’ in her knocking shop to bother to get involved in any way.

I phoned her the other day to give her a chance. Silly me. Far from gratitude, I got the usual tirade of abuse. I’m not going to give this foul-mouthed slattern the honour of column inches, but here are a few choice phrases, to give you an idea: not qualified for sainthood; mischief-making drunken old hag; latching on to causes for your own self-aggrandisement; b****** off.

Very nice. Very grateful. Maybe we should feel sorry for her. She certainly has problems. Maybe it’s difficult living in the shadow of someone as incandescent as her mother and she’s never managed to grow at all. Sure looks that way. But I’ve got some advice for you, Harriet. If you can’t say anything nice, try saying nothing at all, okay? You may be jealous of your mother, but if you can’t learn any other lessons from her life, at least try to inherit some of her dignity. Your mother never slagged anyone else off, however hard she was pushed. Maybe you could try a bit of that yourself?

© Daily Sparkle 2000

Five days at Belhaven puts us right, gets us back on track. We sleep, we take health-giving strolls, we eat wholesome, if flavourless, food and spend time licking wounds and talking. By the time we rattle back to London, we’re feeling like we can take on the world. It takes five days at Belhaven to start the healing process, and a single night at the Ladies’ College is enough to put us right back where we started. Well, it’s not so much the Ladies’ College itself, but the fact that Simon Clamp turns up.

Maybe he’s one of the 20 per cent of the public who feel themselves to be above the tabloids, but he seems, among his stag-night buddies, to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that we are there, Harriet or me. Not that he would give me the time of day anyway. He looks through me tonight with exactly the same uninterested contempt as he did the first time I saw him, when I was seventeen years old; the uninterested contempt of an arrogant man encountering a servant, the uninterested contempt of ‘in’ meeting ‘out’.

It takes me a couple of minutes after I’ve spotted him to work out who he is, and in the end it’s the fact that he pays me no attention at all that makes me realise. I offer him the pudding menu, and he dismisses me with a cursory wave of the hand without looking in my direction. And it’s at that moment that I remember, with a rush of those old wormlike inadequacies, exactly who he is, because this is just how he always behaved when I was in the vicinity. Jesus. Ten years and he’s gone from twenty-two to forty-three years old. The romantic fringe, the lean rider’s muscles, the lightly tanned outdoor skin, the blue-blue eyes, all sucked and subsumed into the corpulence of City success. Jesus. Simon Clamp.

And just as it’s all coming to me and I’m thinking: oh, Christ, here comes trouble, I see him suddenly sit up like a bloodhound that’s caught the scent and start to study Harriet intently. I try vainly to catch her eye, but she’s busy taking beer orders and fending off happy hands, and never looks at me. And then, as she gets round to his side of the table and asks him, without looking at his face herself, what she can do for him, he reaches out and touches her arm, says, ‘You could answer a question for me. You’re not Harriet Moresby, by any chance?’

Simon Clamp. Such a stupid name for someone so important. Simon Clamp, the very mention of whom can take me back to when things were so not-all-right that I thought I would never survive. Simon Clamp, handsome, privileged, snob, scumbag. Simon Clamp who knew that people were whatever he decided they were, and was determined that, if he had anything to do with it, they would never be anything else. Simon Clamp, who has lost his hair and gained three stone, and is eyeing Harriet with a combination of glee and horror. I can tell that he can’t decide which to feel – his face is a picture as malicious gossip and love of aristocracy fight a pitched battle in his heart. Harriet doesn’t even throw a glance in my direction, just smiles and lets a look of pleasant recognition dawn upon her face.

Simon Clamp. I remember him in a nightclub below ground in Oxford, purple velvet pianos and neon-strip dance floor, giant posters of peanut-packet women in half-buttoned waistcoats on the pillars; untouched seventies grunge that had gone the full revolution to retro chic. And I was there for my first ever big night out, in borrowed clothes, painfully aware of my gaucheness, that I knew no one and wouldn’t know what to say to them if I did, terrified by the amount of flesh that Harriet had made me reveal. And as we sat on a velvet-covered banquette and I nursed my rum and Coke, Simon Clamp leaned forward in the crap-DJ lull between tracks and, without looking at me, but so clearly intending me to hear it, shouted into Harriet’s ear, ‘I see you’ve brought your charity case, then.’ Simon Clamp, who smirked at Harriet as the music started and took himself off onto the dance floor as my face flamed and I struggled to look like I hadn’t heard, didn’t care. And inside, I found myself, once again, screaming. Do you know what it’s like to scream on the inside? To feel the roar begin in your stomach, rip its way through your heart, your lungs, your ribcage and never allow your mouth to open lest someone should hear? I haven’t screamed out loud since I was five-years old, but I’ve known all about the silent scream. There have been times when it was all I could hear.

‘Why, Simon Clamp,’ says Harriet. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

‘Nor have you,’ he replies, not seeming to notice the veiled insult. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Working,’ says Harriet. ‘And what are you doing here?’

‘Stag night. You work here?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long have you worked here?’

‘Three months or so. We both have,’ she replies evenly, gesturing towards me with her order pad.

His eyes flick in my direction, pass over me, move away. He doesn’t recognise me. Not surprising, really, because even if he remembered me, all I would be was another little gonk who hung around in the background waiting for the sting of his acid tongue. The friends have all stopped gurgling and are watching this scene unfold. I busy myself with clearing ashtrays.